When people refer to technology platforms, they tend to mean those which use the internet to match-make ( NYtimes article) suppliers and customers. Advocates of the platform economy present it as a new way of organizing work and value creation and as a fundamental and efficient alternative to the “old economy”. Traditional workplaces and employment are replaced by platforms organizing crowds of formally independent freelancers. There are huge platforms like Upwork which organize markets for freelancers in a large number of sectors. There are dedicated platforms which focus on specific markets. 99designs and similar platforms organize freelancers in the creative sector. There are platforms for medical services as well as for so-called microtasks, like categorization of images or writing of short texts. In many cases this is intuitive: Alibaba connects buyers of goods with sellers; Airbnb matches property owners with those wishing to rent; Uber pairs drivers with people who want a ride.
These examples all concern physical assets, but the same can be true for content. Google search, for instance, indexes individual web pages so that people can access them in one place, while Facebook allows people to post photos, videos and other forms of content, and to discover others’ posts via a personalized feed.
Gartner’s Digital Business Technology Platform
While the services provided in the platform economy are very diverse, the platforms share several characteristics. They are multinational companies which offer their services in a number of countries. They all claim that they are not employers and present themselves as neutral mediators between customers und service providers. Workers in the platform economy have no employment relationships and therefore no social security and no entitlements like annual leave, sickness pay etc. Despite refusing responsibility for the workers, the platforms fulfill typical roles of employers like organizing and controlling the labor process.
In other moments in history when there’s been a dramatic technological reorganization of labour like the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, it’s taken decades for workers to find new ways to mobilize within that new environment and find ways to improve their conditions within a new technological paradigm. With digital labour, it’s happening very, very quickly. In a matter of a few years, we’ve seen a wave of worker struggles and new forms of mobilization
All the platforms rely on artificial intelligence (AI) as the technology to connect supply with demand. Nowhere is this more true than in the creative economy, the part of society where jobs rely on knowledge-based and non-repetitive skills and encompass creative endeavours, from music, film and television, to gaming, advertising, arts and fashion. Creativity in AI was used more effectively to match content with audiences, as algorithms learn and classify a user’s preferences in order to recommend content. Elsewhere, AI is used to perform tasks too difficult for humansand in the creation of original content, such as instrumental sounds that humans have never heard before or scripts for movies and novels.
While AI has great potential for the creative economy, many of the creative outputs it enables are frequently routed through technology platforms, a process which redefines the relationship between creators, publishers and technology companies. As platforms and creative economies converge they create a new environment in which the platforms exert enormous influence on our diets of information and entertainment. This raises difficult governance questions that must be addressed by multiple stakeholders.
Platforms do not remain isolated in their markets. Instead, they are becoming conglomerates and leveraging their success into adjacent marketplaces. As they do so, they are introducing similar dynamics into new industries like transportation, entertainment, communication and retail.The positive advances that AI brings are transforming value chains across the creative economy, but there are also negative effects. Technology platforms have been fundamental in shaping the online creative environment and today they face questions when their tools are used maliciously, to exacerbate the “fake news” problem, for example. While this problem did not start because of AI, the use of the technology has enabled the creation and distribution of misinformation and increased its reach.